''Alfapet'' was the original Swedish name for the popular
word game
Word games are spoken, board, card or video games often designed to test ability with language or to explore its properties.
Word games are generally used as a source of entertainment, but can additionally serve an educational purpose. Young ...
''
Scrabble
''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a Board game, game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, re ...
''.
In 1954, the Swedish
board game
A board game is a type of tabletop game that involves small objects () that are placed and moved in particular ways on a specially designed patterned game board, potentially including other components, e.g. dice. The earliest known uses of the ...
company
Alga
Algae ( , ; : alga ) is an informal term for any organisms of a large and diverse group of photosynthetic organisms that are not plants, and includes species from multiple distinct clades. Such organisms range from unicellular microalgae, suc ...
was granted a license by
J. W. Spear & Sons to market ''Scrabble'' in Sweden. For almost four decades, Alga sold the game under the name ''Alfapet'' (wordplay on , the Swedish word for "alphabet").
In the 1980s, Alga was bought by
BRIO, which retained Alga as its board games division.
In the early 1990s, Mattel acquired J. W. Spear & Sons and rescinded the BRIO/Alga license in order to market the game in Sweden themselves as ''Scrabble''.
However, BRIO/Alga retained the right to the name ''Alfapet'', and quickly designed and marketed a similar word game using that name.
The new ''Alfapet'' word game differs in several ways from the international game of ''Scrabble'':
* The board has 17 x 17 squares (instead of 15 x 15).
* There are more bonus squares (even quadruples) and also reduction squares.
* There are 120 tiles (instead of 100) and the values differ from the Swedish Scrabble set.
* The letter Q has a separate tile (but can only be played with a blank tile in Scrabble).
* There are several rule differences.
See also
*''
Scrabble
''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a Board game, game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, re ...
''
*
''Super Scrabble''
Sources
External links
BRIOSwedish Scrabble Association{{Scrabble
Board games introduced in 1954
Scrabble variants